


Fade Away

by wildcosmia



Category: Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town (Song), Pearl Jam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-19
Updated: 2011-06-19
Packaged: 2017-10-20 13:56:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/213491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildcosmia/pseuds/wildcosmia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is her story.  Inspired by the longest title in the Pearl Jam catalog.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fade Away

**Author's Note:**

> An experiment; I'm not sure what brought this on, but it felt nice to get it out. "Small Town" was one of the first Pearl Jam songs I ever heard and I've always loved it. I wrote this while listening to the LO2L version, which is lovely.
> 
> One two three, four two three...

The days, they’ve started to run together.

It’s always so dusty, out here on the edge of town, by the highway that carries the truckers and the commuters from the city and the vacationing families along to their final destinations.

This is no one’s final destination.

She pulls her graying hair off her face and into a sensible bun, readying herself for another day serving those just passing through her small corner of the world.

It’s Friday, says the small insurance agency calendar on the counter next to the cash register. She looks at it every day, to keep herself anchored to the world—if she didn’t, she feels like she could get lost in the unceasing passage of minutes, hours, days, years; nothing ever changes here.

She sets to her usual routine of changing over the menus and signs from breakfast to lunch. There’s only a couple truckers, not together, occupying the place at the moment. The radio’s playing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”; she used to love that song, but after hearing it uncountable times over the decades, she can’t bring herself to feel much emotion for it at all anymore. It’s the same sad story with all of the other songs the radio plays; it, too, has been a constant with its static playlist since she started working there. Just another piece of her life that never changes.

“Have a good day, ma’am,” says the trucker who had been seated at the counter. He leaves a ten on the counter and tips his hat to her. She smiles and replies in kind. She sometimes longs for the days when she was young enough to be called ‘miss’ instead. ‘Ma’am’ makes her feel inappropriately matronly and only serves as another reminder of how empty her life’s been—no husband, no children, no family left except an elderly father who no longer remembers her.

She picks up a small piece of white chalk and writes the soups of the day on the board. Chicken noodle, tomato bisque, and vegetable; it’s been the same three soups on Fridays for decades. If they had many repeat customers, it might be something comforting.

She brushes her hands on her apron and sets to wrapping up silverware in napkins. She’s done it the same way for so long that she doesn’t even think about it any longer: place the napkin diamond-way, first fork, then spoon, then wrap and slip the paper band over; she’s long suspected that if she were one of those funny types who did things in their sleep, she would probably wrap silverware.

As she’s securing the final paper ring into place, the other lunch waitress, a young girl of nineteen, comes out from the back with a smile on her face. “Hi!” the girl chirps, as she begins filling her apron with the shift’s necessities—a pad, a few pens, a handful of mints, straws. She smiles and nods in return. The girl returns to the kitchen; she can hear her and the shift cook exchanging flirtations. That used to be her, once, before she got to be older than the shift cooks. She’s old enough now to be a mother to both of them.

An elderly couple walks through the door. She greets them with a smile and seats them at the booth in the corner, the farthest from the door. The man immediately orders a coffee, “black, but I’ll take three creams and two sugars on the side if you could, ma’am.” The woman orders a Coke with a slightly proud look, as if the soda’s a special treat at the end of another tough week of living. She smiles at them again and goes to fetch the coffee, Coke, and two glasses of water.

The same story repeats itself as more people come in off the highway for their lunch break. Another older couple, a few truckers, a bubbly family of six, and a group of well-dressed professionals from the city make up the rest of today’s lunch crowd. She overhears the city folks talking about how much they enjoy “getting out into the country and eating some real hearty food” and does her best to keep smiling at them even though those sorts of comments always make her feel like she’s being talked down to.

She waits on the big family and has some fun with the children who want to know about the type of potatoes the French fries come from (a freezer bag, but she tells them ‘Idaho’), if she makes the macaroni and cheese with love like their mom does (probably not, but she tells them ‘of course’), and if she will settle a dispute they’ve been having, about the best kind of milkshake (strawberry, but the youngest kid votes vanilla and nobody sides with him, so she tells them ‘vanilla’ with a warm smile for the little one). These are the tables she enjoys; they remind her that her job can still be joyful, something that’s become harder and harder to remember as the years tick by.

As she walks back to the counter with the family’s order slip, the little bell above the door rings. She turns and sees a man walk in, alone. He takes a seat in an empty booth. She’s struck by a sudden feeling, as though she should recognize this man. She watches him for a moment, trying to place his face with a name. He looks as if he’s around her age, maybe, but the years have been kinder and wealthier to him. She thinks he looks as if he’s aged nobly.

She shakes her head and starts again for the counter, to put in the family’s order. The man had seated himself in the girl’s section, and she can hear her working to charm him as she takes his drink order.

She stays busy after that, for a few minutes, but she’s still haunted by his face. It pulls at her memory, as if it’s trying to release a thread that hasn’t been disturbed for many years. She tries to steal glances at him, while she’s rushing back and forth between the counter and her tables, but nothing comes to her.

She’s standing at the counter a few minutes later, dishing out several pieces of pie for the city folks, when he walks up and speaks to the girl. “Another coffee, please? Only one cream this time, miss, if you don’t mind.” The memories suddenly rush into her mind. She gasps at the force, the pies momentarily forgotten.

She’s sixteen again. She’s walking through the halls of the local high school. A boy wearing a letterman jacket is joking loudly with a group of people, but as she passes he pauses to spare her a soft smile.

She’s seventeen. She’s sitting on the green bank of a creek. He pops his head up out of the water and laughs as he walks out of the water towards her, shaking his hair and splashing her with water drops.

She’s eighteen. She’s standing in his front yard, waving good-bye as his father pulls the car away from the curb. He’s hanging out the passenger window, waving wildly and promising, “I’ll write you every week!”

She’s nineteen. He’s never written. She’s only just stopped crying every day for him.

She’s in the present. Her hands are shaking as they place a slice of peach pie on a small dessert plate. She wants nothing more than to hide away.

She collects all of the pie slices onto a tray and takes them out to the city table. The man who ordered the slice of apple is heaping great praise on her for the “impeccable slice of perfection” she’s just set in front of him. She can smile at that—the apple does that to most of the people that pass through.

She walks back to the counter and tells the girl she’s taking a quick personal break. She makes a beeline for the small employee bathroom in the back.

The mirror is small and worn, but she can see herself well enough in it. A few strands of silvery hair have shaken loose from her bun, resting above her cheekbones. She always received compliments when she was younger about her long, “beautiful” eyelashes; she still has them, but they don’t stand out anymore—her eyes don’t seem to burn as brightly as they once did. She raises her hands to her face and runs her fingers down, passing through each wrinkle. She doesn’t quite look ancient, not just yet, but her wrinkles proclaim to the world just how long her life has been. It’s like her weariness has been put on display for everyone to see.

She’s mostly kept her body, but now her few small flabby pockets seem magnified in her mind. For a moment, she hates herself.

She turns the faucet on and runs her hands under the cool water. She wipes her face and dries off with a paper towel. She tucks the loose strands of hair behind her ears. Time to be strong, she tells herself. There’s no time to fall apart.

She goes back and finishes waiting on her lunch customers, alternating between trying to sneak peeks at her old flame and trying to hide from his line of sight. He’s eating at a deliberately slow pace; it’s like he’s hiding out from something she thinks as she watches him swirl his water and move a few fries absent-mindedly around his plate.

The last of her truckers is finished, and she rings him up. He breezes out with a hearty “see you and your wonderful pie on my way back through, ma’am!” She turns on a smile for him and waves kindly as he walks out the door.

She’s doing her best to suppress the urge to run over and say hello to her former beau. He looks lonely, but she thinks there’s also a chance she’s merely projecting that onto him.

She long ago came to terms with the fact that she would never see him again. After his second year in college, his family moved to another town, just across the state line. He never made appearances at their class reunions, which were sparsely attended anyway. Most people ran as fast as they could after graduation and stayed gone.

She didn’t, and most days it feels to her as if her whole life has been spinning its wheels in place.

She had a chance, once, to leave. A chance to move to the city and get a nice department store job and start her own life. Her father knew a man who was willing to put her up for a while as she got on her feet and everything. She didn’t take it, though; she was still waiting for _him_ to come back and start living the life with her that she’d always dreamed about.

By the time she finally faced reality and accepted that he was never coming for her, her opportunity to leave had slipped away. Her mother got sick and her father slowed down. The years moved by as she stayed and helped them live their lives, but nobody ever came to help her live hers.

They’d been gone for over a decade, now, her mother in body and her father in spirit, and yet she remained in place, the same as it had always been.

She takes a bin full of dirty dishes back to the kitchen. She sees him through the order window, paying his check and flirting again with the girl. She knows she should just keep moving, but she’s frozen in place, just watching him. He throws down a few bills on the table as a tip, and winks at the girl as he turns and walks out of the diner.

She walks back into the dining room and catches sight of his shiny black Toyota driving off into the sun.

He’s left her again, left her to fade away into the dust of a long-forgotten memory. She knows it’s not actually fair to blame him a second time, this time; he surely never recognized her today, but she can’t help but feel as if she’s being abandoned all over again anyway.

She wonders if anyone will miss her when she’s gone, or if she really will just fade away into dust, becoming nothing more than a piece of the small town memory that feels more like a folk tale than a real experience.

The bell above the door jingles. A family of five walks in, the adults smiling at her expectantly. She puts her own smile back in place, and moves to greet them and seat them at a big table.

The kids jostle one another over who gets to sit by mommy and who’s stuck in the middle, and she tells a bit about the diner and the area to the father, who is only interested in finding some recreation this afternoon and perhaps a quiet, cozy place to camp tonight. As he talks, she looks outside once more, as if she could still see the man in his car. She swallows away the lump forming in her throat and looks back at her current customers. They place their drink orders, and she goes back to the counter to start filling water glasses. Today’s no different than yesterday, she tells herself.

It’s no different than any other day.


End file.
